Linux Music with Guitarix – A Fix for High CPU Usage

A quick tip for those using the excellent Guitarix guitar effects program on Linux. I regularly found both cores of my machine up around the 90%-100% when that application was running, causing XRuns in Jack and clicks in outputted audio. I just found a way around it. For some really weird reason, SSHing into my main box from a separate, really underpowered netbook (an EEE701) with the “-X” flag, then running Guitarix from that machine, results in much lower CPU usage. It’s weird because Guitarix is still running on my main machine, it’s just displayed on the remote machine. Presumably something in the display code for Guitarix is a lot heavier than it should be.